The message was plastered on billboards throughout the Second World War: “Careless talk costs lives.”

And if Roy Hodgson needed a reminder of the gossamer thread by which hangs the England manager’s job, especially in an age where every word he utters is examined forensically, it came over the past 24 hours.

Not, it has to be said, someone who believes brevity is the soul of wit.

Indeed, never a man who would use 10 words when 100 will do.

But well-read, liberal, decent and honest. And with not a racist bone in his body.

If you have spent any time with him, private time as opposed to press conferences, the impression can only be positive.

Hodgson regrets deeply his decision to end his playing days in apartheid-era South Africa, something he recognises as a dreadful error, but do not castigate his integrity or humanity.

Nothing will hurt Hodgson more than the suggestion that his half-time analogy, which boiled down to “get the f****** ball to Andros Townsend” – if he had simply used that offensive word, nobody would have batted an eyelid – had any background meaning.

Yet Hodgson, like so many of his predecessors, has been flung into the eye of the whirlwind for loose comments, the scale of the reaction from some dwarfing the reality of the situation.

Glenn Hoddle lost his job because of his beliefs.

Suggesting the disabled were paying the price for the sins of a previous life is a somewhat Buddhist view, rather than the Christianity he espouses, but, with the tide turning against him, Tony Blair’s daytime TV sofa intervention sealed his fate.

Yet even Hoddle has now been resurrected, forgiven. He is a member – and a perfectly-qualified one – of Greg Dyke’s Commission to plot the way forward.

Before Hoddle, Graham Taylor’s image was defined by the fly-on-the-wall documentary which followed his last 18 months, while Kevin Keegan was always only a press conference away from spontaneous combustion.

Sven Goran Eriksson might have survived his flirtations with Manchester United, Chelsea, Ulrika Jonsson and Faria Alam, but not his loose lips to the “Fake Sheikh”.

And Hodgson was elevated to the job himself last year after Fabio Capello bad-mouthed his employers over the John Terry situation on Italian television.

Lion kings: But Capello and Eriksson both talked their way out of the England job (Image: Ian Walton)

What Hodgson said in the privacy of the dressing room was designed to engage Chris Smalling and Townsend, not enrage them.

Were he someone who had, even privately, made genuinely racial jokes, a man who thought nothing of stereotyping black players, it would have been very different.

But he does not, did not, would not.

Hodgson is interested in a player’s talent, not the colour of his skin. His England represents what is now a multiracial, harmonious rainbow nation.

He will select the players he considers the best 23 for the World Cup, irrespective of background. And how many 66-year-old managers can say that?

Hodgson will learn a lesson from this and weigh the repercussions of words uttered in haste and repented at leisure.

When you are England manager, even one who has achieved his first requirement, you are under the microscope.

The chalice may be poisoned.

Roy Hodgson’s mind, however, is not.

He said something which was possibly cack-handed, even if the idea that it was will fill him with horror.